The Signature Tree

James was working his mill in the early morning chill, set up in a clearing cradled in the crook of two intersecting ridges. Millenia of colluvial deposits formed this broad, flat terrace that now nourished a forest of towering grey gum, white mahogany, stringybark and ironbark. Wildlife sounds usually filled the air in this glade above the gullies. Lyrebirds’ symphonies of masterful mimicry, territorial auditory archives of the forest, were indistinguishable from the original. The plaintive ‘kee’ squeals as red-tailed black cockatoos soared in majestic flight overhead, following the contours of the valleys. Resonant notes of currawongs, echoed in rhythmic patterns through the treetops. Fluty, haunting melodies of butcherbirds rose and fell with intricate phrases, adding to the rich auditory tapestry of the Australian bush.

Today, the roar of gleaming machinery drowned out all other sound. The big blade gleamed and whirled at three thousand revolutions per minute. Each of its six super sharp Tungsten Carbide Tips careered hungrily around the rim at five and a half kilometres per minute, biting into ironbark logs and spewing out clouds of shavings in a fragrant golden haze. The Peterson mill sang as it chewed its way through an ironbark log, as loud as AC/DC singing Hells Bells on the Back In Black tour.

Gilles loomed suddenly into view, making throat-cutting gestures towards the big Honda powerplant. ‘James. Regardez!’ he yelled.

Gilles had come up with the idea to cash in on the ecotourism market by building an ecotourist park on his mountain property. He employed James to mill the logs he’d felled into timber for the construction of the cabins and to continue clearing similar flats nearby. The irony was lost on him that to provide a bush experience to paying customers, he was destroying the very bush he wanted them to pay to experience. His gallic insouciance extended to his lack of plans and building approvals.

James slapped the kill switch, and as the mill clattered into silence, he enquired curiously, ‘What’s up, Gilles?’

‘Come, I show you my secret tree. The grandfather of all trees. Allez! Avec moi!’

They followed the fire trail a few hundred metres up the mountain in Gilles’s work-weary old Pajero to a barely perceptible track through the scrub. They navigated the vestigial trail to a broad, flat slab of rock at the head of an overgrown, but gently sloping dry watercourse. ‘We walk from here. Not far,’ Gilles said eagerly. ‘We can clear this enough to get your mill close. There must be enough timber in this tree for three big houses. I could build ten cabins!’

‘Let’s just get a look at it first.’

Within a couple of hundred metres, the scrub gave way to bare rock again. Rising walls of rock closed in on the valley, which deepened and narrowed as it continued its gentle descent. Beneath a deep overhang, they rested and drank from a spring-fed rockpool that discharged a thin stream down the valley. Then the height of the rocky walls diminished, the valley widened again, and Gilles led them out of the valley to the side. There, on the crest of a gentle knoll, stood the very definition of a signature tree. Towering more than thirty metres, its canopy spread at least that far in diameter. Untouchable as far as James was concerned.

Oblivious to James’s building consternation, Gilles hurried to his “old friend” and threw his arms wide in an embrace of the deeply fissured trunk, while James cast an appraising eye over the tree and its surrounds as he took a more measured approach.

‘What do you think? Magnifique, non?’

Shit! I’m wasting my time here, James thought, but said, ‘Non!’

‘Que? The spirit of the tree, he told me he is solid. All the way through!’

‘Wanker!’ he muttered under his breath, then pointed out the debris field on the ground beneath the canopy. ‘Look, see all those skinny-walled tubes all over the place? They used to be branches in this tree. They’re all termite-eaten and broken off.’

‘Non, non, non! That happened after they fell. The termites, they eat them on the ground.’

‘They continue to eat them on the ground, yes. But look up there! Way up about twenty metres, see the white streaks? That’s bird shit, probably a powerful owl nest in the hollow just above it.’

‘Oui, but the branch breaking off made the hollow, non?’

‘Non, the termites made the hollow, the branch fell off, the owl moved in.’

‘But the spirit of the tree…’

‘Must have been a different spirit, Gilles. Come look at this,’ James said, pointing to the dry muddy grey tubes snaking up the trunk of the tree, almost invisible in the deep fissures of the bark.

Disconsolately, Gilles complained ‘When I bought this place many years ago from Colin White, he told me his pioneer ancestors left this one because it was too difficult to get it out of the bush from where it is.’

‘Gilles, he’s an Aussie, he was having a lend of you. It’s what we do. C’mon, mate, the mornings shot now, let’s go back to your place for lunch, eh?’

Gilles’s disappointment was palpable. James felt it in every step of the trek back to the parked vehicle in the growing heat of the day. The bush around them was alive with the symphonic chorus of cicadas, the collective song rising and falling like the breath of the forest. It was a relentless acoustic wave, a crescendo building to a near-deafening pitch, then tapering to a mesmerising hum. It did nothing to soothe. Resentment joined disappointment to form a crowd in the Pajero as they completed the drive to the homestead in moody silence.

As he parked in the shade by the cabin, Gilles said, ‘I think you are wrong, James. I think that tree is tres precieux with much timber. I pay. You take it down. Who knows?’

James slammed the door and strode away, snarling over his shoulder, ‘I do!’